1671 - German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz refines the binary number system

1822 - Charles Babbage designs his first mechanical computer

1848 - British mathematician George Boole devises binary algebra, paving the way for the development of a binary computer nearly a century later

1890 - The 1880 census took 7 years to complete so the Census Department held a contest to find a better way, it was won by employee Herman Hollerith who went on to found the company that later became IBM

1939 - John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry of Iowa State University complete a prototype 16-bit adder, the first machine to calculate using vacuum tubes

1971 - The computer game "Star Trek" is created by Mike Mayfield on a Sigma 7 minicomputer at MIT

1971 - Vietnam War veteran John Draper discovers the giveaway whistle in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes perfectly reproduces a 2600 hertz tone; Draper builds a "blue box" that, when used with the whistle and sounded into a phone receiver, allows people to make free calls

1972 - The first video game console for the home market, Magnavox Odyssey, is released

1973 - The Xerox Alto is introduced as the first personal computer and the first to use a mouse, the desktop, and a graphical user interface

1975 - Don Daglow, a student at Claremont Graduate University, writes the first computer role-playing game for PDP-10 mainframes called "Dungeon" an unlicensed implementation of the role-playing game "Dungeons and Dragons"

1975 - The MITS Altair becomes the world's first mass-produced personal computer kit and the first to use an Intel 8080 processor

1976 - Seymour Cray develops the Cray-1, the first supercomputer to make vector processing practical

1977 - The Apple II personal computer is launched

1977 - Atari releases its cartridge-based console called the Video Computer System (VCS), later called Atari 2600

1978 - The term "hacker" is first used when boys who ran the early switchboards of Bell telephones were fired because they were misdirecting calls and listening in on conversations

1980 - IBM enters the personal computer market

1980 - Bill Gates offers to provide an operating system; Q-DOS is licensed to IBM and MS-DOS/PC-DOS is born

1981 - The IBM PC is released

1982 - The Commodore 64 is released and becomes the best-selling PC of all time

1982 - Time Magazine names the home computer the "Machine of the Year" or Person of the Year for that year

1982 - Apple Lisa is released for the retail price of $9,995

1982 - A program called "Elk Cloner" is the first computer virus to appear "in the wild"

1983 - The home computer Enterprise 128 is announced

1984 - Apple computer launches Macintosh, announced by a single commercial broadcast during Super Bowl XVIII

1990 - Microsoft introduces Windows 3.0

1991 - Linux is born with the following post to the Usenet Newsgroup comp.os.minix: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones; the post is by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds, and his hobby grew into one of the most widely used Unix-like operating systems in the world

1991 - Promoting OS/2, Bill GAtes says "DOS is dead;" later that year the development of DOS 5.0 leads to the permanent dropping of OS/2 development

1992 - The PowerPC 601, developed by IBM, Motorola, and Apple Computer, is released making it the first-generation of PowerPC processors

1993 - The game "Doom" is released by id Software and the PC begins to be considered as a serious game-playing machine

1993 - The Intel Pentium processor, invented by Vinod Dahm, is released

1995 - Windows 95 is launched; unlike previous versions of Windows it is an entire operating system and does not rely on MS-DOS

1995 - "Concept virus," the first Macro virus, is created

1997 - IBM's Deep Blue becomes the first computer to beat the reigning World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a full chess match